Dark Time : A Novel

A woman survives the dramatic crash-landing of an airplane on the Hudson River, only to disappear into thin air. Her husband begins a journey to find her that leads him hundreds of miles from home, to uncover her secrets in the desolate tundra of northern Canada. In his masterful debut novel, Chuck Radda takes readers deep into the new territory of Nunavut, where Martin Wilkes struggles to come to terms with the truth about his wife, his marriage, and ultimately, the meaning of his life. With a wide-ranging cast of characters that includes a cranky detective, a psychic Inuit, a daredevil pilot, and some uptight suburbanites, Radda captures the desperation of a man teetering on the brink of losing everything he holds dear.

People have asked me where the idea for Dark Time originated. Hard to say, especially since the end was completely different from what I started out to write. But I can say this: I've always been an aviation nut--had a fascination with its successes and failures. When that U.S. Airways Airbus 320 landed in the Hudson and didn't sink like a stone--when everybody got out of the plane alive--I just saw that as a good jumping off point for a novel. I didn't want it to be a novel about the crash itself--we already knew the ending. Instead I chose to follow the path of one of the survivors and find out what happened to her a day later...two days...longer.

As for the settings, I've always been interested in meteorology (my son is a meteorologist) and especially weather extremes. In New England we do have four distinct seasons, but our winters--even this one--pale by comparison to those of Nunavut in northern Canada. And as I wrote and researched, I learned more about the area and its people--an isolated and rugged group who are, nonetheless, plodding along through the twenty-first century like the rest of us. I hope I portrayed them fairly.